Editorial January 16, 1926 Issue

"Righteousness exalteth a nation"

Duncan Sinclair

The student of history knows how true is the saying, "Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people," to be found in the fourteenth chapter of Proverbs. Let a nation be just, upright, moral; let its tendency be towards the spiritual and away from the material, and its prosperity is assured. But should materiality be allowed to hold sway and the sensuous to predominate, then the nation, whatever it may be, is bound to descend in the scale of civilization. The law is fixed: "Righteousness exalteth a nation;" but evil doing degrades it, even to the point of its extermination should it continue to indulge in sin.

Nowhere is greater stress laid on the blessings which attend righteous living than in Christian Science. Its teaching from first to last lays emphasis on the value of spiritual understanding, the understanding of God, good,—its omnipresence, its omnipotence,—going so far as to declare that the opposite of good, so-called evil, has neither real presence nor real power. But that is precisely what mortals, generally, deny. They believe in the reality of evil, and they practice evil; the result is disease, sorrow, lack—every form of suffering. And when the balance tilts far enough in this, the wrong direction, national decay sets in, leading finally to national destruction, unless the voice of Truth be heard and obeyed, and repentance and reformation ensue.

Christian Science is doing a great service to the world by showing mankind how to cease sinning through the understanding of good. It is helping to remove the reproach from all the peoples of the earth who are willing to listen to its message and to obey the truth which that message reveals. How strongly does Mrs. Eddy extol righteousness in these words of hers in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (pp. 448, 449): "It is Christian Science to do right, and nothing short of right-doing has any claim to the name. To talk the right and live the wrong is foolish deceit, doing one's self the most harm. Fettered by sin yourself, it is difficult to free another from the fetters of disease. With your own wrists manacled, it is hard to break another's chains"!

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